Till the stage of your post graduate education, you get a lot of structuring done for you. The syllabi, modules, time schedules, specified books, practical sessions, experiments and so on re given to you on the platter. Only the execution part is expected from you. Nobody tests your learnings and knowledge outside the peripheries of the established syllabi so you very conveniently know what you got to study and how much. The moment you step into the PhD programme, you got to take the responsibility for your own task, unlike all your prior academic experiences. You would surely have people to help you and guide you, officially and unofficially but end of the day what is to be done and in what capacity is your own responsibility and all the mistakes that you make, knowingly or unknowingly, specified or unspecified are all yours to take blame for.
A PhD scholar sometimes feels lost as he isn’t traversing a path that has been taken up by others earlier on. Expectation such as having to initiate discussions, constructive arguments or learning initiatives can sometimes make you feel overwhelmed as not every scholar feels accomplished enough to know what is to be done when and may feel lost or confused with expectations and opportunities flooding from all directions.
When research students enter the system as scholars. They feel motivate enough to do a research that is noticeable for outstanding contribution in their field of study. However, for most of them, by the time they reach the completion of the course, all that they care for is to get the degree. In all the interim years, the enthusiasm gets dampened by lots of demands and expectations for conducting repetitive tasks on everyday basis. More so when the surrounding environment is such where everyone just cares about their own work and have nothing to do with others. Sometime scholars feel their own image getting lost under the pressure of immense demands. However, they must learn to come out of the pressure carve themselves out as competent professionals who are confident of their own knowledge and at the same time know that boundaries that have been set for them. The journey of a PhD scholar is a transition or growth of a dependent student into an independent, confident and achiever who knows precisely what is expected of him in that given environment.